In this commentary, originally posted at the South Dakota Searchlight, a retired journalist living in Mitchell, looks at South Dakota’s proposed voucher program.
To hear South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem tell it, her newly proposed and euphemistically named “Education Savings Account” program is all about giving disadvantaged parents the “freedom” to choose an “education that’s best” for their children.
But that’s not what it’s really all about.
It’s end-goal in practical terms is to give qualifying parents some $3,000 per student in tax money to send their children to religious schools — 77% of private schools nationwide are Christian — where, not coincidentally, faith indoctrination is allowed in the academic curriculum and ideas such as abortion, gender fluidity and sexual diversity (supposedly rejected in the Bible as “unnatural” abominations) are formally demonized. And where ideas like the still-enduring and severe institutional inequities still burdening Black citizens in America — characterized as “America-hating” by naysayers — are pointedly not taught.
This disingenuous (meaning dishonest and, thus, arguably un-Christian) use of the term “choice” regarding educational goals has been bandied about for 68 years, since the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ruled that race-segregated public schooling in America was unconstitutional. Almost immediately thereafter, Whites-only, tax-exempt private schools, known as “segregation academies,” began robustly sprouting in the South to circumvent the Court’s edict.
By 1958, more than a million Southern students were attending these academies, as state legislatures during the next seven years passed hundreds of new laws “attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools,” according to a study titled “A History of Private Schools and Race in the American South,” cited by the Southern Education Foundation in 2023.
The high court then vacillated over a number of years between allowing and then disallowing tax exemptions for nonprofit private schools, religious and secular, but in 1983’s Bob Jones University v. The United States the Court also disallowed such tax benefits for private religious schools if they discriminated by race in policies or practices, or favor one religion. Previously, the K-college school’s curriculum was taught from a biblical perspective, teachers were required to be devout Christians, university donors and administrators held that the Bible prohibited interracial dating and marriage, and African Americans were ineligible for enrollment.
This should be a no-brainer. The Second Amendment’s freedom-of-religion clause was created so that no single religion could dominate our nation, as Christianity had lorded over Europe for centuries, with catastrophic consequences when Catholicism splintered into myriad Christian sects during and after the tumultuous Protestant Reformation. During the 30 Years War (1618-1648) fought between Catholic and Protestant states in the Holy Roman Empire for religious hegemony in Europe, an estimated 8 million Europeans died from combat, famine and disease.
This kind of religious sectarian catastrophe is exactly what the American Founding Fathers were trying to avoid by establishing a constitutional requirement of religious freedom and sectarian non-coercion in their fledgling republic.
The problem since is that although U.S. leaders have labored mightily to achieve that, the lion’s share of Americans, despite the diverse abundance of religious denominations they have subscribed to, have been and remain predominantly Christian (68% today) — so Christian privilege, because of the faith’s ubiquity in its many forms, is a dominant cultural force that has proved domineering and coercive in U.S. culture.
That’s why Congress, under Christian pressure and general political fear — arguably unconstitutionally — changed the U.S. motto to “In God We Trust” from a secular phrase and inscribed our money with it, and arbitrarily inserted “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance during the 1950’s “Red Scare” over godless Communism.
And why the Supreme Court today, with its mostly devout Catholic justices and a 6-3 conservative bent, ruled on June 21 this year in Carson v. Makin that states that provided education vouchers for students to attend private secular schools would be discriminating against religion if faith-school vouchers were not also provided. This opens the door wide for required taxpayer support for Christian and Catholic parochial schools nationwide — and growing religious incursions into the tax-supported American public square.
The Founders surely would have balked at such.
Although Gov. Noem did not mention Christianity or God in her Dec. 3 address to the Legislature proposing her 2026 Education Savings Account program, they were loudly implied. With the lion’s share of private schools being Christian, in our state as well as America writ large, it’s a good bet that much if not most of the $4 million she estimates her plan will cost the first year would go toward indoctrinating eligible kids in the Bible and its invisible deity, and teaching watery history.
Let’s call them Christian “segregation academies.”
